It's been a busy week for British music, what with the annual Mercury argy-bargy and four lads from Liverpool having some albums out. I've retreated from the madness with another British record that comes out next month: Cate Le Bon's debut, Me Oh My. Despite it's calming qualities, however, it's also quite mad – full of folk-coloured compositions both wacky and wonderful. What interests me, though, is what lies at the heart of their weirdness. This is Le Bon's Welsh accent, all big and belly-deep.

Before we plunge into Le Bon's world of bone-shoeing and hollow hounds, let's get one thing clear: whichever genre we're listening to, a regional accent still jolts our ears. We can blame popular music's strongest instrument, the Americanised vocal, for this, which we first heard when Elvis uh-huh-huh'd. In the 1950s, confident America was spreading its message to the world through popular culture, and postwar Brits living through an age of austerity wanted to believe in the dreams of a cool, classy country. As rock'n'roll and the US were essentially interchangeable concepts – the pursuit of liberty, the possibilities of freedom – to teenagers in Britain, so American tones and tics became part of our language. This lives on. Listen to any British X-Factor contestant in 2009, be they from Aberdeen or Aberdare, and you'll hear the myth wail. Overhear any playground conversation, and you'll, like, hear speech patterns that are, like, so taken from, US TV shows.

British accents started to break through in rock music in the 60s, although Merseybeat bands often sounded as Brooklyn as they did Bootle. Even Ray Davies, the quintessential English pop songwriter of the Kinks, was not averse to crossing the Atlantic for intonation. Native accents tended to be more apparent, however, when artists were either being absurd, or trying to reference their past, and therefore their roots, directly. Polythene Pam by the Beatles – a song about an early Beatles fan who used to chew plastic – does both, for example.

This is where I come back to Le Bon, and her album's title track. Me Oh My is a song about the night creeping into a bedroom. Le Bon's West Walian vowels are lengthened just-so in the track, enough to take the listener to an eerie place, but not so much that they forget it is an everyday place. The song is so creepily effective, in fact, that it becomes clear that an accent out of pop's ordinary can be a great vessel for the uncanny; for alerting us to the foreign qualities that often lie within the familiar.

This isn't a new phenomenon, reserved for women who sound like a proggy PJ Harvey. Since the late 1960s, many big stars have sung in broad accents that somehow helped them seem worlds apart. Take Beckenham's David Bowie, singing "to Mah-ay-jer Tom" in Space Oddity, and packing pop's most supernatural song with very human details ("Here am I sitting on a tin can"; "Tell my wife I love her very much"). Then there was the first synth-pop chart-topper, Gary Numan, whose No 1 single Are Friends Electric? featured lines about hallways, doors and "paint peeling off of my walls". They were as palpable as they were ghostly, even when Numan, in blank Estuarine, called them "waw-oo-lls".

Not every singer with a regional accent is a strange creature, of course. As the American rock'n'roll myth has waxed and waned over the years, British bands have used their own voices joyously to tell their own stories – from T-Rex and the Cockney Rebel in the 70s, to the Arctic Monkeys and Glasvegas in the noughties. These voices still jolt us, however, because they sound like us, and not stars. The likes of Bowie, Numan and Le Bon merely take this idea further. When they sing about real things in their real voices and our spines chill, they are reminding us about the essential strangeness of being human. In fact, they make us look at ourselves and say: "Me? Oh my."